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and later with the Brothers Le Keux, he worked steadily at his art. In a letter to a Dundee friend, dated 1821, he speaks of some recent success with a plate as the result of four years' learning and experience in the art." He adds, "I was but two years old in engraving when I set up for myself, and have been two more on my own fingers; and as some of my friends seemed doubtful as to the success of such an experiment, I am very happy and somewhat proud of this result, in which I have obtained one object of my ambition."

Such success, however, as he had attained was not sufficient to encourage him to persevere. The truth seems to be that the passion for literature was rapidly supplanting all others. He continued to practise versewriting, and to devote his leisure to literary pursuits, while following conscientiously the craft he had adopted as his livelihood; but the "bowl," as he expressed it, "had at last found its natural bias." "While thus playing at literature, an event was ripening which was to introduce me to authorship in earnest, and make the muse, with whom I had only flirted, my companion for life. In the beginning of the year 1821 a memorable duel, originating in a pen-and-ink quarrel, took place at Chalk Farm, and terminated in the death of Mr. John Scott, the able editor of the London Magazine. The melancholy result excited great interest, in which I fully participated, little dreaming that his catastrophe involved any consequences of importance to myself. But on the loss of its conductor the periodical passed into other hands. The new proprietors were my friends; they sent for me, and after some preliminaries I was duly installed as a sort of sub-editor of the London Magazine."

It was in the summer of 1821 that the Magazine entered on its new lease of life, with Messrs. Taylor and Hessey as publishers and editors, and Thomas Hood in the post of sub-editor. He was only twenty-two, and

the enthusiasm with which he entered on the hazardous path of literature was already tempered by anxiety, from

MEMOIR

I

(1799-1821)

It is a noticeable fact, testifying, perhaps, how far with Thomas Hood the reputation of the humorist has eclipsed that of the poet, that the abbreviated form of his Christian name by which he is so frequently called seems to be of posthumous origin. There is no evidence that he was known in his lifetime even to his intimate friends as "Tom" Hood, and his wife, after a common practice of that day, always wrote of him in her letters as "Hood." Acting therefore on the principle enunciated by the late Mr. Albert Smith that "you have no right to take liberties with a gentleman's name because he makes you laugh," I enter my humble protest at starting against a too common custom; and most surely there was little in the temperament of the man, or the character of his genius, to justify the familiarity, or to excuse it.

Hood was of Scottish descent, his grandfather having been a humble tiller of the soil near Errol, a village on the north bank of the Tay, between Perth and Dundee. A son of this Hood, after serving his apprenticeship to a bookseller in Dundee, proceeded to London, and making his way by industry and a certain feeling for literature, finally established a publishing business in the Poultry,

in partnership with a Mr. Vernor. He seems to have prospered fairly in most ways save in his own bodily health, and that of his family. He had many children, several of whom died in infancy, or lived to exhibit some promise, and then succumbed to the sad inheritance of consumption. The eldest son, James, died in this way, and the father, while tending his son, took the fatal chill which rapidly resulted in his own death. They both died in the autumn of 1811, and Thomas was left the only surviving son. He was rather over twelve years of age, having been born in his father's house in the Poultry on the 23rd of May 1799.

When Hood, in 1839, re-issued the contents of several years' "Comic Annuals" in the new form which he entitled Hood's Own, he added, at his publisher's request, certain autobiographical recollections, which are our chief authority for these earlier years. He there tells us that his first school was in Tokenhouse Yard, a convenient distance for a native of the Poultry, and was kept by two maiden ladies of the name of Hogsflesh. "The circumstance," he adds, "would be scarcely worth mentioning, but that, being a day-boarder, and taking my dinner with the family, I became aware of a Baconian brother, who was never mentioned except by his initial, and was probably the prototype of the sensitive 'Mr. H.' in Lamb's unfortunate farce." From this elementary training Hood was transferred in due course to a well-known school at Claphamthe "Prospect House Academy" he was afterwards to celebrate in memorable verse :

Ay, that's the very house. I know
Its ugly windows, ten a-row !

Its chimneys in the rear !

And there's the iron rod so high

That drew the thunder from the sky

And turned our table-beer!

Hood, looking back in later years on these school experiences, did not acknowledge much to be grateful for. Prospect House, he said, was

'one of those places

improperly called semi-naries, because they do not half teach anything"; and confessed that all he learned of value was gained in his holiday seasons, or his play hours, when he could gratify an insatiable appetite for general reading, and that he was "an idler, lounger, tattler, rambler, spectator, anything rather than a student."

On the death of his father, in 1811, his mother removed to Islington, and Thomas Hood once more changed his school, this time to "a house, formerly a suburban seat of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, over a grocer's shop, up two pair of stairs, kept by a decayed Dominie, as he would have been called in his native land." The master was a pedant and an eccentric, but loved his craft, and speedily recognised in young Hood a boy who was keen to learn. Hood admits that he at last made some progress even in school subjects. "I picked up some Latin, was a tolerable English grammarian, and so good a French scholar that I earned a few guineas -my first literary fee-by revising a new edition of Paul et Virginie for the Press."

The exact chronology of Hood's earlier history is hard to fix. He cared as little about dates as his friend Elia, and gives us little or no help in his Literary Reminiscences. His son and daughter, when writing their father's life, seem to have been much in the dark as to his youthful days, and not even to have taken advantage of such light as was available. It was in 1811 that Mrs. Hood and her family removed to Islington, and it was about three years later that her son Thomas was sent away, for reasons of health, to his father's relations in Dundee. How these intervening years are to be appropriated remains uncertain. For a time he was under the care of the "Dominie " just named, and subsequently, according to his own autobiographical fragment (which his son and daughter, oddly enough, treat as of doubtful authority), was placed in a merchant's counting-house in the City. Hood's account of matters is, however, circum